An option is definitely not anything like a greenlight for a film, nor is it even talent being hired to develop a film, and all it is, really, is a producer lying down some dollar to prevent anybody else scooping up a great potential. Bearing that in mind, I’m still really very pleased to report that Don Murphy has optionedCory Doctorow‘s semi-sci-fi political activism adventure novel, Little Brother. There’s really no need for me to tell you too much about the book when, thanks to Creative Commons, you can download it for yourself, for free. I recommend the nice, easy-on-the-eye pdf version styled by Bruce M Campell. All I’ll tell you in advance is that the story doubles as a kind of handbook on how to use social networking media, wit and chutzpah to fight back in a dictatorship. If you’re worried about this being neutered or sillified in the translation, note that Murphy has retained Doctorow as a consultant for the feature adaptation. Why not go the whole hog and have him write a draft?

Don Murphy might be one of the noses on the Transformers grindstone, and he may have also brought us such disappointments as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell and Natural Born Killers but his better judgments include Apt Pupil and the upcoming Splice, Second Sight and (very best of all) We3, from Grant Morrison’s cyborg-pets-go-kill-crazy comic series. Indeed, just this week Murphy was talking to Sci-Fi Wire about progress on We3:

We’re working with a director named John Stevenson. Don’t be confused, though. Even though he directed Kung Fu Panda, the movie’s going to be live action. It’s going to be a combination CG, puppetry [and] real animals. We have a great script, a great director, and we’re trying to figure out who’s going to pay for it in this marketplace, but we’re looking.

A couple of years back I said We3 was the greatest unproduced script I had ever read, and I still believe that to be the case a huge pile of screenplays later.

In the same interview, Murphy revealed some details of his next collaboration with Shoot ‘Em Up director Michael Davis:

Susan [Montford, his wife and producing partner] and I are working on a project with him that we’re getting ready to take to town, which is set in a world in which everything that you loved in spy movies is real. So everybody wears white jackets and drinks martinis.

A great set up. What’s the betting Clive Owen will be back?

For a while, at least, Murphy was working on the planned directorial debut of Neil Gaiman, an adaptation of his Death: The High Cost of Living comics to be called Death and Me. That too had a dynamite screenplay but lately… lately it’s fallen off the radar.

Bearing in mind the various exciting projects that Murphy has lined up was pretty much all that got me through my screening of Michael Bay’s silly old Rock’em, Sock’em movie this week. That and the evil, under the breath laughter of my screening companion.